Google Earth 6 - those terrible fonts!

[WarrenL]

Version 5 of Google Earth was giving me some problems (double-clicking My Places wouldn't work, etc) so I downloaded and installed Version 6.

Most of my problems are now solved, but there's the reappearance of another that seems to be annoying the **** off Linux users all over the web - the terrible fonts GE uses on Linux. From what I can gather it comes down to the QT4 libraries - GE uses its own instead of the system ones. Somebody's even gone to all this trouble:

http://www.techytalk.info/2009/08/ba...gly-fonts-fix/

But it doesn't work on GE6. Does anybody know anything more about how to fix this minor but annoying problem that Google doesn't seem to want to do anything about?

[Vaphell]

http://www.google.com/support/forum/...8bc427dd&hl=en

try that part with hiding GE versions of QT libs and setting paths to system versions in qt.conf
if you have 64bit system you need to use getlibs on googleearth-bin to install 32bit dependencies (or install all 32bit libs manually)
on my 64bit box i get to see nice fonts but in a second it crashes with meaningless message and some stacktrace in logs, maybe you'll be more lucky.
Googlor people are one of the brightest in the industry but GUI of GE is nothing to write home about - unbelievable.

[WarrenL]

G'day Vaphell,

I got as far as trying that myself, and upon restarting GE I had the joy of about two seconds of a nice-looking GUI before GE crashed and disappeared. I guess if I were smarter I'd know where to look in log files for more information, but I'm always barely flying by the seat of my pants when it comes to computers.

Cheers,
Warren.

[nerdy_kid]

I tried deleting Google Earth's packaged QT libraries, and had the same thing happen to me. About 1 second of fitting in, then a seg fault. Run google-earth in a terminal to catch the backtrace.

[Vaphell]

internet says that no fix for this problem exists yet :/ maybe before it crashes i'll take a screenshot to look at from time to time weeping.

Google really should set up proper repos for their linux programs like God commanded.

[WarrenL]

Marko over at techytalk.info responded to my comment and had a good bash at making things work, but failed. Scroll down to see the new comments:

http://www.techytalk.info/2009/08/ba...gly-fonts-fix/

It looks like the Google Monster doesn't really care about us.

[gongyiliao]

For those who are using amd64 platform:

In fact, you can just

install the 32-bit version of libfreeimage3 under /usr/lib32

then modified your last line of /usr/bin/google-earth as:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libfreeimage.so.3
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib32:.:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH ./googleearth-bin "$@"

then you have everything:

1. nice anti-alias fonts in GE6
2. GE6 shows Chinese, Japanese, Korean properly.
3. add your findings here.

[pros]

googlearth 6 font rendering issue

Solved in LUCID 64bit

Move to a different location or simply delete following files

/opt/google/earth/free/libQtWebKit.so.4
/opt/google/earth/free/libQtNetwork.so.4
/opt/google/earth/free/libQtGui.so.4
/opt/google/earth/free/libQtCore.so.4

Now you need some 32 bit packages that you can find in http://packages.ubuntu.com/
install libfreeimage3 32 bit- libfreeimage3_3.10.0-2_i386.deb (uncompress i386 deb and copy in /usr/lib32 following files: libfreeimage.so.3, libfreeimage-3.10.0.so, libfreeimageplus.so.3, libfreeimageplus-3.10.0.so)

install libphonon4_4.6.2-0ubuntu5.2_i386.deb (uncompress i386 deb and copy in /usr/lib32 following files: libphonon.so.4, libphonon.so.4.4, libphonon.so.4.4.0 and finally put in /usr/lib/qt4/plugins/designer file libphononwidgets.so)

change last line of /opt/google/earth/free/googleearth to

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libfreeimage.so.3
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib32:.:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH ./googleearth-bin "$@"

[ranjan_mg]

I am trying to get rid of those terrible fonts.. I cound not find libphononwidgets.so in ubuntu 11.10 repositories

Also, when I try the remaining steps, I got GE to start, with nice looking fonts but when I click on a picture inside GE, nothing is displayed..

[ranjan_mg]

OK>> A bit more googling, I was able to solve..

Needed
(libqjpeg.so libqgif.so) in plugins/imageformat/ directory

From here...

http://swyear.blogspot.com/2011/05/r...-opensuse.html